In light of the recent announcement that the New Orleans Times-Picayune will scale back the frequency of its print editions, the following chart bears studying:

This chart was part of a recent presentation by Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins. (I got hold of it through Poynter.)

So, what’s the takeaway? If you extend those trend lines any further, you can see that the revenue won’t be there in the future to support a printed newspaper. If newspapers want to stay in the news business, they better have a plan to get out of the paper business.

2 responses to “The glass is half-empty AND half-full”

The real challenge, though, is that print and web revenues are often connected (and the latter inflated) — a lot of times, web ads are ‘thrown in’ to sweeten a deal on print inserts, etc. This, of course, again dilutes the business model and gives an inaccurate snapshot going forward of where revenues might come from. While we are not going back to the fat days of 400 page weekend metro papers anytime soon, neither do we (my opinion) have a sustainable business model vis a vis ‘web news.’